Students at Clarkdale celebrate National Red Ribbon Week

This week, all students at the Clarkdale Attendance Center are celebrating National Red Ribbon Week, raising awareness of drug abuse prevention.

Clarkdale High School seniors, who are members of CHS Leads, came up with each of the themed days for students to dress up for, to recognize Red Ribbon Week with themes like “hats off to being drug free”, where students wear hats, or dress to correspond with the theme assigned to that day.

“I think it’s really important to really encourage all of the students, you know, even in like simple dress up days. It’s just a fun way of informing the students on the different kinds of drugs and the ways you can be addicted and all of that. So, I just think it encourages them to learn about it now, so hopefully in the long run they’ll make better choices and maybe not go down the wrong path,” said Jaime Harrison, CHS senior.

“This is only my second year participating in it, other than just dressing up, and not really know like what goes behind it and stuff, so I think its important because, sometimes when you’re younger, you don’t really understand what being drug-free is, but when you get in high school its really like a big impact, because of peer pressure and stuff. So, you want to make sure you stay drug free,” said Amber Fant, CHS senior.

One student shared that she was glad they were still able to plan something to recognize Red Ribbon Week, since they weren’t able to hold some of their usual events for it, due to COVID-19.

“It makes me really happy that we’re still able to have certain things with Red Ribbon week, because even if we cant have the full experience, I think that any amount of information that we can give to anybody – and anything we can do to inform the students about the importance of being drug free is just something that we need to do, even if we cant have the assembly, you know. we can still give the facts and we can still bring awareness to how detrimental drugs and alcohol can be to a teenager and anybody,” said Lauren Lewis, CHS senior.

National Red Ribbon Week takes place each year from October 23 – October 31, and is the largest drug abuse prevention campaign in the nation.